


While Storms Form on the Left

by pearthery



Category: Gintama
Genre: Angst, Boats, M/M, POV Second Person, it is emo takasugi hours
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 08:00:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24966349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pearthery/pseuds/pearthery
Summary: Takasugi, a meditation on boats, and Gintoki.
Relationships: Sakata Gintoki/Takasugi Shinsuke
Comments: 10
Kudos: 44





	While Storms Form on the Left

**Author's Note:**

> the title comes from Tom Rosenthal's 'Reaching For The Book and Time, While Storms Form on the Left'  
> edit: i feel so victorious i've learned how to align text

The ship rocks beneath you. You can hear the waves gnawing at the wooden planks, searching for cracks to fill. Back and forth, back and forth. You've spent a long time on the sea; you're used to this restless rhythm.

Gintoki isn't. You can hear him shifting in the room adjacent, his clothes rustling on the sheets. You have no idea where he got that ridiculous new kimono, but the patterns, the lines boxing in the swirling clouds, they rub you the wrong way. The way this creaking ship cages in those weary eyes rubs you the wrong way. But you've been going the wrong way for a while now, so why's it feel so wrong?

Is it Gintoki? Is it the man who's haunted your dreams for so long? Is it the man whose tears still sting in your left eye? Of course it is. Of course it is.

It has been ten years and however many lifetimes you spent together as children, testing out words and weapons against each other beneath the pine trees. In the dark space of these vast years, the beast in your chest has been shrieking. It has screamed and threatened and begged, searched desperately for an answer to how the world could be so cruel. And then, on the dusty ground with Gintoki bleeding before you, it keened and found its reply.

You lie back in the cot and stare at the ceiling above you, damp with saltwater and the moisture from your breath. He should've just kept playing house, left this mess to you. Let you play at ex-boyfriend while he rests in his new nest watching those kids of his grow up and plague the world. The universe, even. The girl is a Yato, after all.

Ah, who are you fooling? Certainly not yourself. Isn't it terrible to feel such clarity? Isn't it terrible to know all this? Not even all your fury, nor your guilt, nor your grief could drive him away. He is a stray dog, bruised and beaten and loyal to the slightest shreds of kindness, and the faintest scent of past bonds. What does he need these past bonds for? What, what, what, you ask.

How he has fit so many people into his life is beyond you. A dozen brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, grandparents. A hundred friends, a thousand allies. Gintoki's world is so big now. It's more than just the Joui, the four of you in a muddy tent. It's more than that little school beneath the pine trees, more than those three children on a dark road and their warm-eyed teacher. His life has grown beyond you. His life is beyond you.

He has so much to go back to, you think. And he's here with you.

You remember his slender, calloused fingers in yours. You remember the gleam of his hair in the wind, his profile against the bloodstained sky, the beat of his heart beside you, the glow of firelight on his face. You're glad you cannot see him right now.

He is your other self. Crows mate for life, don't they?

He breathes softly in the other room, not quite in tune with the waves, but he has never been very good with boats. One time, during the war, you were on a ship together, and he spent the whole time curled up queasy amongst the ropes. He didn't throw up like Tatsuma, but he had a disgustingly nauseous look on his face the entire time, and you remember heckling him smugly, right until he suddenly recovered and lunged to punch you.

You can't see Gintoki through the rotting wood, can't touch him. You want to touch Gintoki; you want to pummel him into the ground; you want to beat him black and blue and send him home; you want to hold him with the same gentleness with which he looked at you when you walked to your room and said goodnight. You want him to be happy.

After all your tragedies, Gintoki has found peace. For him, it is a dirty, cosy apartment above a bar in the red light district, surrounded by dust and the scum of the earth. It's a red-headed Yato girl and a glasses-wearing samurai boy. It's an old lady, a robot, a cat Amanto, a city of steel women. A princess, a town of degenerates, a compound of stubborn policemen, a force of shinobi. A dark-haired crow of a woman who denounced the heavens. You suppose there would be a place for you too if you weren't fated to die.

There would be a place for you, you know. There would be a place for those idiots you called a crew, a place for Takechi, for Matako, for Bansai. Kamui has been wrestled back into his responsibilities, and you're sure that if he tried his hardest, Gintoki would do the same to you. You aren't adverse to the fantasy. You want to laugh, you want to smile, you want to rest well.

Oh, but there's nothing to be had in worrying about the future, is there? For you, there is only the past and the present. And for you, those two are the same.

Tomorrow you will reach the harbour. Tomorrow you will step onto the streets of Edo. Tomorrow Gintoki will go home and leave this tired little vessel behind.

* * *

_He knew all the waves, some of them by name.  
He kept them in a book,  
One he called time,  
And time was with him again, forming on the left,  
What if this voyage would take him to death?_

_And if this was the end,  
There was so much he wished, he wished he had said.  
There was so much he wished, he wished he had said._

  
Tom Rosenthal  
 _Reaching For The Book and Time, While Storms Form on the Left_


End file.
